September 11, 2026 · 7 min read
How English is taught in Kazakh schools, and what it leaves out
School English in Kazakhstan gives students grammar and vocabulary. It rarely gives them enough time to actually speak. Here is what that gap looks like, and what fills it.
In most schools in Turkistan Region, English is taught the way it has been taught for decades: a textbook, a grammar point each lesson, exercises copied into a notebook, and a test at the end of the term. Classes often run to twenty five or thirty students, sometimes more in a village school where one teacher covers several grade levels. In a lesson like that, a student might get thirty seconds of actual speaking time across the whole week. The rest is reading, writing, and listening to the teacher.
This produces students who can often conjugate a verb correctly on paper and still freeze when a stranger asks them a simple question in English. It is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is what happens when speaking practice is the first thing to get cut from a lesson plan, because it takes time a large class does not have, and because one student talking means twenty nine others sitting quietly.
None of this is really the teacher's fault. A school English teacher in Kazakhstan is usually working with a fixed national curriculum, a class size set by the school, and two or three lessons a week to cover grammar, vocabulary, reading, and writing all at once. There is no room left for eight minutes of pair work when the syllabus still has three more units before the exam. The structure of the school day, not the teacher, is what limits speaking time.
A small group or one to one course outside school works differently because it can afford to. With five to eight students instead of thirty, everyone gets real speaking time inside fifty minutes, not by taking turns one at a time but through pair work: students talk to a partner, swap partners, then report back to the group. That structure alone produces more spoken English in one lesson than a typical school week does.
Correction works differently too. In a large class, a mistake made out loud is often corrected on the spot, in front of everyone, which teaches a student that speaking is risky. At Airim ELC, correction happens at the end of an activity, after the group has finished talking, not mid sentence. A student can make a mistake, keep talking, and hear the correction afterward instead of stopping to feel embarrassed in front of classmates.
None of this replaces school English, and it is not meant to. School gives a student in Koksayek grammar, vocabulary, and a foundation that a course like General English, group or English for children can build speaking practice on top of. A child who is already learning tenses in school arrives at a smaller group already knowing the rules; what they are usually missing is the fifty minutes a week where using those rules out loud is the actual point of the lesson.